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We’ve recovered from our ep300 festivities and we’re back answering your Q’s with our best A’s - How to handle multiple projects on a dev team? What should we call JavaScript? Tips for scroll-jacking in a nice way? Best practices for CSS? And how to write when you don’t want to write?

Ada is a developer advocate and senior developer at Samsung. Previously a PlayStation developer, Ada now dedicates her time to pushing the limits of WebVR, and experimenting with client-side APIs.

Time Stamped Show Notes

0:47 – When Ada isn’t writing code, she’s usually attending conferences, speaking at events, or watching films. She’s really interested in WebVR, so she enjoys spending time trying out new demos and playing video games.

1:07 – Right now, Ada is really interested in the WebXR API which is being managed by the Immersive Web Community Group. It allows you to build fully immersive experiences and works with almost any VR headset that can connect to a browser.

1:39 – Ada is also interested in HTML and how developers can start building dynamic software using declarative technology. Lately, she’s been researching web components to see how to build modern web apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

2:12 – Despite a few teething issues, Web Components are gaining traction. Ada uses a combination of the official Polyfill and the ShadyDOM CSS polyfill.

3:19 – One of Ada’s favourite libraries right now is A-Frame. It’s essentially a web component wrapper for three.js, and three.js is an abstraction library for WebGL. Ada says that three.js makes writing raw WebGL easy.

3:55 – Anyone with experience only in HTML can learn A-Frame quite easily and start building with VR. Ada thinks it’s amazing that A-Frame uses web components but doesn’t actually use any of the scoped CSS or ShadowDOM aspects of it. The custom components A-Frame generates aren’t used to change anything in the DOM; they just add elements to the three.js scene in JavaScript.

5:42 – Ada would like to see developers building suites of web components rather than full websites, so that designers who know CSS and HTML can use them to put together full layouts.

6:12 – When Ada was a child, she used to make simple games in the browser using IE5, Firefox, and One Day. This is what inspired her to get into graphics.

7:15 – After working as a Playstation developer, Ada moved to The Financial Times where she improved her web development skills and had the opportunity to work on some VR projects.

8:06 – You can already build augmented reality projects in the web using libraries that give you access to the camera and accelerometer.

8:17 – The WebVR Standard was recently renamed the “WebXR Standard” to include mixed reality, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Ada thinks that it will form part of the standard toolkit of the web in the future.

8:54 – AR hardware is going to be the future of immersive media, because many people don’t like the isolation of VR.

9:31 – Glitch has become an invaluable part of Ada’s workflow. It’s an online code editor like CodePen or JS Bin, but with access to a full virtual machine with a Node environment setup.

10:13 – Ada loves that Glitch allows you to “remix”, meaning you can get a copy of a project’s source code, edit it, build something of your own, and then share it again.

11:01 – Because Ada does a lot of rapid prototyping, she became frustrated setting up new build environments all the time. She also didn’t like explaining everything to other devs before they could work on her code.

11:53 – This frustration caused her to change her approach. Now Ada uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the frontend and doesn’t transpile any of her code. She uses ES6 if she’s building something that needs to work only in a few browsers, and adds a transpilation step if it needs to work across many browsers.

14:41 – Ada is really excited about Comlink by the Chrome team. It allows you to expose an API through post message and provides an asynchronous API to your function calls. Not only does it work between a web worker and the main page, but it also works across domains. This is incredible because it means we can make API’s that work entirely in the client side without touching the network. Plus, with service workers, you don’t even need an active network connection to make an API request.

18:27 – Ada is interested in developments in Web VR, new ways to think about the declarative web, and anything that changes the way developers work on the frontend or in the browser.

19:12 – A talk by Jeremy Keith inspired Ada to rethink the power of declarative languages. She believes that the beauty of HTML is that it is forgiving. Rather than using HTML as a render target, she uses it to describe what she’s building. Then she uses CSS for styling, and JavaScript to bring everything together.

Quickfire Questions

22:16 – Best advice about programming

It’s more important to get something out there that works than it is to get it perfect.

23:09 – Habits for writing better code

Use linting to create neat, readable code. Get to know your tools well and set them up in a way that suits your process. Become comfortable with CSS.

Harry Roberts is a heavy-weight in the world of front-end architecture. While working at Sky, Harry began developing approaches to writing manageable and scalable CSS, revolutionising the way people think about front-ends. Harry now consults for a long list of companies like Google, The UN, The BBC, and Deloitte.

Time Stamped Show Notes

1:55 – Harry loves anything to do with the outdoors. He enjoys hiking, mountaineering, mountain biking, and cycling.

2:36 – About ten years ago Harry and his best friend started a graphic design company. When building their company site, he realised he was way better at code than he would ever be at design. That’s when he decided to get into front-end development.

3:43 – In 2011, Harry started working as a senior developer at Sky, a broadcasting and multimedia company in the UK and Europe. This was where he got into large-scale performance architecture. He then got a job building the UI’s for highly-trafficked websites making hundreds of millions of Pounds a year. From there, he moved on to do the same for other companies. For the last three and a half years or so, he has been working for himself.

10:33 – Harry explains that he doesn’t really use many tools. He says that he’s good at prioritising things, and tools or not, he gets things done. Harry runs his life on a “just in time” basis. He only completes tasks right before they are needed as a way not to frontload too much information. This technique prevents him from having to memorise things for too long.

12:19 – Because he travels so much and is often in different time zones, Harry says that it’s difficult for him to develop a routine. Although he has known for a couple of years that he needs to address this, he isn’t sure how to go about it.

12:51 – Harry admits that he’s bad with email. He knows he could fix this by implementing a routine, but he hasn’t yet. Also, he still uses Gmail even though he has heard that Inbox is better as it allows you to treat your email like a todo list.

14:23 – Harry says that he doesn’t really use frameworks. He gets more excited about standard specifications. Service Worker is revolutionising everything.

15:00 – Harry uses Web Components. He thinks they will allow developers to start moving things out of frameworks and into standardised specs.

15:13 – “I really want the web to win so I’m just quite excited about the platform in general at the moment. I’m not working with a particular library or framework specifically at the moment – I’m quite agnostic in that regard.”

15:48 – Harry says that he’s lucky to get invited to a lot of conferences. Last year he went to thirty! Even though it is work for him, conferences are also great opportunities for him to learn. He is constantly surrounded by people doing interesting new things and who are demystifying complex concepts.

16:40 – Harry admits that he is genuinely in love with his industry. He is fascinated by what developers are doing, and browses Hacker News or Twitter whenever he gets the chance. He is constantly immersed in what developers are doing, but he doesn’t learn these things inside out. He just keeps a broad view of the industry. “You can just watch a 40 minute talk and think, “I understand enough about that to know that I don’t need it yet and when I do need it, I know where to start Googling”.

18:58 – Encapsulation has had the biggest impact on how Harry thinks about code. In his experience, when a client’s CSS is in a mess, it’s usually because they’ve made it too complex.

19:35 – “The first time you ever do anything you will probably get it wrong.” Understanding this, you should make sure that everything is undoable and encapsulated enough that you can decommission discrete sections of your code rather than having to rewrite everything.

Quickfire Questions

20:55 – Best advice about programmingOliver Reichenstein once told Harry, “never do it for money, but never do it for no money”. Developers tend to love what they do to the point that they will do it for free. This often leads to open source burnout.

22:02 – Habits for writing better code

Pragmatism and laziness. Not trying to write perfect code the first time you are faced with a problem.

23:09 – BookHigh Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik. It has made Harry a fundamentally better developer because, after reading it, he understands how the internet actually works.

23:49 – Inspiring devs

Anyone on the Google Developer relations team. He mentions Alex Russell and, specifically, Jake Archibald, because he’s doing a lot of work with Service Worker. He also mentions Paul Lewis for his render performance work, and Nicolas Gallagher who made big waves at Twitter.

25:29 – How to learn code from scratch

When asked how he would go about learning programming from scratch, Harry jokes that he he might not want to, and that his dream job is to be a park ranger in a national park somewhere. He would like to “wake up and check that the eagles are ok and maybe release a deer trapped in a fence”.

25:45 – If he had to learn programming again, Harry says he would probably take a similar approach to what he did the first time. He would reverse engineer things and pick them apart. However, this time he’d start with the fundamentals about the internet. After reading Ilya’s book, he learnt that you can learn all the HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the world, but if you don’t understand how it’s getting transported to users, then you’re probably making incorrect decisions.

26:42 – Another inspiring dev

Harry mentions Jeremy Keith as another developer who inspires him. Jeremy focuses on the fundamentals.

26:56 – How to work smart

Harry’s programming tip is not to memorise stuff you don’t have to. He believes that working smart is to devise a plan of attack, take a pragmatic approach to things, and become good at prioritising. Learn how to ask for help, and surround yourself with people who know more than you do.

Sara is a freelance front-end web developer, author, and speaker from Lebanon. She was named Developer of the Year in the 2015 .net magazine awards, and awarded a Web Platform Award from O’Reilly. Sara is the author of Codrops CSS Reference, and is the co-author of Real-Life Responsive Web Design, which focuses on smart “responsive” workflows, effective UX patterns, and powerful front-end techniques.

Time Stamped Show Notes

2:33 – Sara is passionate about the possibilities developers have to build useful things for people and for the generations to come. She believes developers have the tools for building the future, and is excited by the fact that the web is getting more powerful by the day.

3:21 – Sara says that learning and teaching have opened a lot of doors for her. She first got into speaking because of the articles she wrote whilst experimenting with, and learning new features. She actually got her first job from her experiments on CodePen.

4:34 – Burning out after working on a project taught Sara about what to do, what not to do, what to expect, what not to expect, and to tell clients what to expect and what not to expect.

8:16 – Sara explains that she doesn’t use a lot of frameworks or tools. She uses HTML, CSS, and Sass. On very simple projects, she doesn’t even use Grunt, Gulp, or any other build tool like that. She writes with the bare minimum.

9:00 – Sara uses Alfred to speed up her workflow.

9:37 – TextExpander helps Sara save time by allowing her to respond to frequently asked questions in emails she receives using templates.

10:17 – Sara loves Sublime Text as her editor, and uses a lot of the plugins that come with it to help her type less.

10:52 – Sara works early in the morning to avoid distractions on Twitter.

11:27 – Sara removes any applications, such as email and Twitter, from her work computer that are not essential for work.

13:05 – Larry mentions how Dash is an app that aggregates documentation, and also integrates nicely with Alfred. It also has its own snippet manager, similar to TextExpander.

13:56 – Sara finds that she doesn’t have the most productive way to set up projects. She currently uses Jekyll for her website, but the bigger the website becomes, the slower Jekyll becomes.

14:30 – She admits that Grunt, Gulp, Browserify, or Webpack would make her workflow better, but she finds the thought of installing them and getting them to work overwhelming.

15:42 – Sara is excited about CSS Grid, because it’s like a CSS framework without a framework. She believes that there’ll be no need for any kind of CSS framework to build grids and websites in the future. She mentions that she has never been a fan of frameworks like Bootstrap as she feels there’s always too much to edit, change, and fix.

16:21 – Combining CSS Grid with Flexbox is “like magic”.

17:23 – Sara makes time to learn new things when she needs to use new things.

18:48 – “Java is to JavaScript as car is to carpet.” Sara studied Java in university. Learning that there was a fundamental difference between Java and Javascript, and that there was a mental shift required in order to work in the different languages has changed the way Sara views technologies.

Quickfire Questions

20:17 – Best advice about programming

Learn the basics. Learn HTML, CSS, and native JavaScript before rushing into frameworks. Learn what you need, when you need it.

20:46 – Habits for writing better code

Thinking from a user’s perspective, not only a developer’s perspective. Test components early on – not code testing, but user testing.

22:50 – Inspiring devsEthan Marcotte and Jeremy Keith. Sara is inspired by anyone who works for the user and who teaches people in the industry to care about them too. She likes that these two authors teach developers how to write better experiences.

24:40 – How to learn code from scratch

Sara says that she would definitely be overwhelmed at first if she had to learn programming from scratch. She mentions that she is thankful that she had a mentor to help her get started from the right place. She would start with the basics, because she can’t use a tool or a language unless she really understands it.

25:34 – How to work smart

Work healthy. Take care of yourself and to get enough sleep. A healthy body is a healthy mind.

Jobs hunting and the frustration with job titles. Why isn’t it ok to only know HTML and CSS in 2017? Why do bootcamps seem to focus on javscript so much? We’re joined by Lara and Mandy for this episode to try and figure all of this out.

Official Post from Mikeal: After my recent adventures in WebComponents I thought it would be fun to sit down with Alex for a quick chat.Alex has been working on WebComponent standards since the beginning. We touch on the history as well as some of the changes in programming style when you have to live in the same world that n

Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf on Twitter) works on the Polymer team in Google and is an expert in emoji and how to make them appear correctly in browsers – or not.
She’s lately given an eye-opening talk at the HTML special day of CSSConf in Amsterdam where she showed the shortcomings of the input element when it comes to browser support (you can watch it at the end of this post if you want to). We’ve caught up with her for this whirlwind interview on Web Components, backwards compatibility of the web and sensible use of JavaScript. It was recorded live at SmashingConf in Freiburg, so there is quite a high amount of background noise. But the content is worth it – promised!

Author, developer and web standards evangelist Aaron Gustafson returns to the show to discuss progressive enhancement and how fundamental concepts are still relevant today. We discuss development philosophies as well as dive into development specifics of progressive enhancement, how planning and responsive design fits in, as well as the business and user case for always developing with progressive enhancement in mind.